My business partner, Julie, has been asking me to blog about Groupon and Snaglo for a couple of months. I have resisted because I knew that I was going to have to go online and spend some time poking around the sites before I would have anything helpful to say. In the end, they are both good ways to save, but they both, especially Snaglo, require you to spend quite a bit of time to save money.
Here’s the philosophy behind Groupon.com:
-
Each day they feature something cool to do at an unbeatable price in your local area.
-
You only get it if enough people join that day…so they ask you to invite your friends!
Groupon.com is a novel idea in that the only way you get the deal is if others on the site sign up as well. Today on the site they were offering $150 worth of yoga at a San Jose studio for $25. If you were interested in the deal, you had to keep checking back to see if enough people had signed up before you could find out if you got the deal. It was a bargain, but I get a little irritated at checking back to see if the “deal is on” (which is why I hardly ever “bid” on eBay but often get things at the “buy it now” price).
Here’s what Snaglo.com says about themselves:
“At snaglo.com members must purchase bids to be used in our auctions. These bids are used to place incremental bids on our items. The last bidder when the time expires wins the item at tremendous discounts.”
In order to bid on the Snaglo.com website, you actually have to purchase the bids. Each bid costs seventy-five cents and the more bids you have, the more likely it is that you will be the last one still bidding when the time runs out. It makes sense that you can save a lot of money by playing this auction game but, once again, it seems like it is sort of a time sucker and makes you stay glued to your computer. And since I have adult ADD when I’m online, I would probably forget that I was bidding on something a waste a bunch of money on the early bids.
As far as recommendations go, I think that everyone can benefit from sites like Groupon and Snaglo if they have an item or service in mind that they are going to spend money on anyway. If you aren’t disciplined, though, they could take up a lot of your time AND your money.
Happy Saving!
Darcy Ratner and Julie Arnheim
Founders, Rubbingnickels.com
a friend
Nice post on Snaglo. It’s actually some of the controversy/skeptical interest that has led us to create a review website with detailed penny site info. Our site lets you see the average savings people can expect to get (ie. 15%, 38%) for any product on any auction site. It’s all arranged by category (ie. Giftcards, Video Games, whatever) and you can see rankings on any level. If it helps your readers, here’s a link to some detailed Snaglo Reviews.